Personality Disorders Forum Activities Survey
The Personality Disorders subcommunity used to have five regularly scheduled forum activities per week:
1) Monday Fun Day = icebreakers and fun questions
2) DB Tuesday = information about DBT skills with discussion questions
3) Welcome Wednesday = shout-outs for new community subscribers
4) Thoughtful Thursday = thought-provoking question or idea to reflect on and discuss
5) Friday Check In = general check-in
We have been considering adding back some or possibly all of these forum activities with the goal of creating more opportunities for community members to feel engaged and supported.
However, before we make any changes, we want to get the community's feedback so that we can feel confident that any changes we do make will be relevant and providing things that the community actually wants. If you feel like filling out this survey, it would be appreciated!
Link to survey HERE
Community Taglist:
Done. Thank you for the opportunity!
Hi everyone. 😊 It's been about a week since the survey was posted and a few days since any responses were last submitted, so I wanted to share what people had to say. Thank you so much for the responses!
Interest in forum activities
This was the average level of interest (1 = not at all interested, 7 = very interested) for each of the different activities that were mentioned:
These are some of the things that people shared they were interested in having:
- Ways of coping in everyday situations
- Educational content
- Uplifting facts
- Discussion of experiences that take more vulnerability to admit
- Discussion of how to improve on respecting others' boundaries
- Discussion of experiences with violating others' boundaries
- How to deal with confrontation
Writing another post sharing my own personal brainstorming/ideas/thoughts in response to the forum activity survey results.
Overall, there seems to be the greatest level of interest in adding back Thoughtful Thursday and DB Tuesday. When I think about what these are designed to offer, as well as the feedback in the written comments, I think there are two major things that people want:
- Sharing deep/vulnerable thoughts, feelings, and experiences
-
Receiving tools, ideas, information, etc. for coping
I started thinking about DB Tuesday in particular and how we would go about implementing that if we decided to do it. Some thoughts that crossed my mind:
- Should have reliable/trustworthy information: Nobody on the PD forum team is qualified to formally teach/practice DBT. Even if someone were a licensed, practicing psychotherapist in real life (which to be clear I don't think any of us are 😊), listener guidelines and forum rules prohibit claiming to be an expert and offering to give professional/medical advice. So anything we share needs to be based on reliable external resources.
- Should be sustainable over the long-term: I reviewed the old DB Tuesday forum that was last active in March and it looks like there were only 6 weekly discussion threads before it fizzled out. Ideally whatever we create should last for a long time and be something that could remain active over a span of months/years.
-
Should be comprehensive enough to be helpful as a substitute for DBT: As a listener, I've chatted with multiple members who have said they are interested in DBT but don't have access to it for various reasons (i.e. can't find a good therapist, not comfortable going to therapy, can't go to therapy because family would find out and horrible things would happen, etc.) This reminds me of something in the 7 Cups culture guide saying that one of the primary needs that 7 Cups is trying to fulfill is to provide free mental healthcare to people who don't have access to it. Ideally, DB Tuesday would help tap into that need.
***
The idea that comes to mind for me is to adapt a comprehensive DBT self-help resource into a long-term series of forum discussion posts.
- This DBT self-help resource would be something that provides a systematic, complete, detailed presentation of basically everything there is to know about DBT. So it satisfies the criteria of comprehensiveness and reliable/trustworthy information.
- If we split this content into threads based on concepts/topics, there should be enough to create dozens of threads over a span
of months. Whenever we reach the end of the topics, we could simply move the threads into an archived sub-forum, loop
back around to the beginning, and start over again. So, it satisfies the criterion of long-term sustainability.
Brainstorming details/benefits of this:
- As far as what self-help resource to use as a starting point, I did a web search and easily/accidentally managed to find several websites that provide a free, electronic copy of the 1st edition of The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook. The consensus I've seen is that this is an amazing workbook, but I'm really worried about legal/ethical issues related to copyright/plagiarism (so I'm also not linking to those sites in this post 😊). I believe a safer alternative would be to use the content on https://dialecticalbehaviortherapy.com. The forum team could condense, rewrite, paraphrase, etc. as needed while attributing/linking to the original source.
- Each thread could include 1-3 discussion questions at the end that
encourage reflection, critical thinking, and connecting back to everyday life and personal
experiences. This would allow this series of threads to potentially
address both of the major needs identified in the community survey: (1) tools/coping
skills, (2) expression/sharing/reflection.
- Based on some of the known topics that fall within the scope of DBT (e.g. emotional regulation, interpersonal effectiveness), I believe the discussion questions associated with this discussion series would probably cover most if not all of the topics that people expressed an interest in reflecting upon in their written responses to the survey.
- I believe these reflection/discussion questions would possibly be much more targeted, relevant, and thought-provoking than what might otherwise come out of trying to do a more general Thoughtful Thursday. My suggestion would be to do this DBT thread 2x/week instead of having DB Tuesday 1x/week and Thoughtful Thursday 1x/week.
- The group discussion/sharing/reflection aspect of all of this would probably make it a richer and more satisfying/helpful experience for members than trying to independently go through the original self-help resource on their own. The guided/paced/scheduled/structured nature of it might also encourage people to work through the material who otherwise wouldn't have the motivation to do it on their own. (I know I personally don't have the patience or work ethic to slog through either 40 modules or 300 pages of DBT on my own lol.)
Tagging other community leaders for feedback, ideas, critiques, or resources. Including group leaders since there might be insights you have from the DBT group discussions that have already taken place.
@azuladragon34 @insightfulSalamander4097 @Xe @Lou73 @FirstLight4762 @StarlitSky4762 @Jish07541 @sereneButton43 @NewPenguin @Tamy4210 @Dancia @sophiasanae
@QuietMagic Thank you for the amazing post! Adopting a DBT resource seems like a great idea considering the demand for it. I will be glad to help out wherever required.
For DBT discussions, you can check out the Themes 1 and Themes 2 scripts on our dashboard. They are developed by Star and based on various DBT skills, they also have templates in them and resources.
Generally Project Agents write scripts for discussions for Group and Forum both. Which I think is a sustainable solution, it can be a bit hard to brainstorm ideas and form scripts each week.
Perhaps we can make some outlines for DBT skills related Forum posts? Some rough drafts that all forum leaders can use. We can also compile a list of questions that can be inserted in that outline if we want variety.
I am not privy to forum scripts so you can approach Cheery for that, they can perhaps share templates from other subcommunities which will give us an idea on how to frame these.
Also since the major concern is having a space to share and getting to learn coping skills, we do not necessarily have to follow DBT skills.
Perhaps something more casual, like the risk taking post did really well. It is something which can be deep and informative at the same time. So we can have more broader questions related to coping for various issues. This will bring variety and also start conversations.
These broader questions and discussions can be about topics which are related to PD's but not intrinsic to them and are sensitive in nature like self-harm, dissociation, self esteem issues, imposter syndrome, dealing with stigma, trauma, self image issues, aging, psychiatry experiences ect which can be quite vulnerable and difficult to talk about.
(Will get back to this post again and address everything, for now these are my immediate thoughts)
@Xe
Thanks very much for the feedback/thoughts!
I like the idea of having a general plan/outline ahead of time for what the general topics will be for the whole series of posts. And having some kind of template where we fill in the details for each post (e.g. information, discussion questions).
Thanks for pointing to the Themes 1 & 2 scripts. It looks like they broadly cover some of the same topics (i.e. the four modules of DBT) and there might be a fair amount in there that we could pull or draw inspiration from for filling in those "details".
Re: having Project Agents write forum scripts, this probably wouldn't work for the PD community in its current state since Dancia is the only Project Agent and she has limited availability.
I agree that that a separate series of general discussion/skills post could work well since 1) there are lots of relevant/worthwhile topics you've mentioned that don't fall within the scope of DBT, and 2) there might be enough of these topics that it would be sustainable for months. (The risk-taking thread is an outlier as far as activity/interest level since it got dozens of responses from people outside the PD community due to being part of the August Self-Esteem Challenge.)
Hi everyone--just to close the loop on this, based on the feedback we've received, we're going to be adding two weekly discussion threads:
-
DBTuesday = exploration of DBT skills and concepts
-
Thoughtful Thursday = reflection on various sensitive topics related to PD's
Thank you to everyone for all of your input. 💜 If everything goes according to plan, both of these will be starting next week!
@QuietMagic
It's great to see these discussion threads starting up again. How exciting! I'm looking forward to interacting more with members and listeners on the forums with these discussions 😀 Thanks everyone for the feedback!